With rapid development of the Internet of Things, to manage subscription over the Internet of Things more effectively to configure an Internet of Things terminal more flexibly and effectively, and especially to meet a special requirement of a specific application scenario and operating environment, the international standards organization Global System for Mobile Communications Association (GSMA) puts forward a demand for an embedded universal integrated circuit card (eUICC). An eUICC may be applied to a terminal closely related to people, such as a smartphone, a tablet computer, or a wearable device, to better satisfy a special requirement of people on a new smart card and a need of terminals to develop towards higher integration.
Generally, at least one user profile is installed in an eUICC. In other approaches, an eUICC supports only one enabled profile. Therefore, only one network can be accessed at a time. In view of this, to use one eUICC to implement functions of two universal integrated circuit cards (UICCs), one solution is to implement a dual card function by flexible and quick switching between two profiles.
In the other approaches, however, when the eUICC performs a profile switch, the terminal deletes data of an originally enabled profile from a cache of the terminal, re-initializes the eUICC, reads data of a newly enabled profile, and stores the data in the cache. In such a profile switch process, an eUICC platform first needs to be re-initialized. That is, the eUICC is first powered off and then powered on again, a voltage class supported by the eUICC is matched, and a communications protocol is re-negotiated, among other actions. Then, a network is accessed using the newly enabled profile, and a complete network authentication process is completed. This authentication process usually consumes a relatively long time. Therefore, a service interruption, a service loss (for example, missing a phone call), or the like is to occur in the entire profile switch process, and user experience is relatively poor.